Setting up Selenium and Geckodriver on Ubuntu to use with Python

Question

I'm having troubles setting up Geckodriver to run with Selenium on a Ubuntu VPS, referring to this previously asked question.

My current setup:

• Selenium Version: 4.17.2
• Firefox Version: 122.0
• Geckodriver Version: 0.34.0
• Python Version: 3.8.10
• Ubuntu Version: 20.04.5 LTS

Steps:

1. Installing all the necessary packages

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

pip install selenium

tar -xvzf geckodriver-v0.34.0-linux64.tar.gz
chmod +x geckodriver
sudo mv geckodriver /usr/local/bin/

The last command puts geckodriver on PATH, this is needed according to this post

2. Verifying installation

firefox --version

./geckodriver --version

pip show selenium

3. Executing a test script

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options

options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("https://www.example.com")
print(driver.title)
driver.quit()

This works like a clock on a local Windows machine but on a headless Ubuntu VPS returns this error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 6, in <module>
    driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 69, in __init__
    super().__init__(command_executor=executor, options=options)  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 208, in __init__
    self.start_session(capabilities)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 292, in start_session
    response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, caps)["value"]
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 347, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 229, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Process unexpectedly closed with status 1

Where did I go wrong? Help much appreciated.

Answer 1

It looks like you're incorrectly setting headless mode. And you appear to be spinning up the browser twice (once without options). Use this for setting headless mode correctly:

options.add_argument("--headless")

Your full script would look like this:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options

options = Options()
driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
driver.get("https://www.example.com")
print(driver.title)
driver.quit()